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Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Month 12 Day 28

In
the morning I did the last of my morning routines at Camp Garmsir,
came back, packed up, and loaded up the truck. I took a photo of it
before I left. It is amazing we still call ourselves expeditionary.
The truck was visibly sagging under the weight of just three men’s
gear.

We left the gate at Garmsir for the last time and moved back to the
circus tents that we arrived in one year ago.

I spent a good part of the afternoon pecking away at my school
admissions essays. I was tired of looking at them (I can only imagine
that they will be tired of reading them), so I did a second workout
for the day. That was nice.

They did an inspection in the evening searching for rounds in Marine’s
gear. Col Schmitt, in his typically blustery fashion has promised to
use Non-Judicial Punishment against anyone who is found with a round
the moment that we make it back to the grinder and in front of all of
our families. A round has already been found in one of the advon
guy’s gear, so we’ll see if it’s an empty threat. It just seems
stupid. There are 500 guys here, somewhere someone is going to have a
round. I used to do line-outs with my platoon and plant three rounds
on three people and have my platoon search until they found them. It
took 30 minutes one time, and I ended up with 5 rounds instead of 3,
and we were only searching cammies and daypacks. There is no way
these Marines are going to be able to comb through every little bit of
gear well enough to find a round. We don’t have Xrays here, so the
test becomes the Xray machine in Manas, but you can’t adequately prep
for it. Anyway, its just another instance of the ‘tough guy’ attitude
and it has got everybody all stirred up because they don’t want to be
embarrassed in front of their families, and they don’t want to lose
their leave. Brawny has been paranoid, he has packed and unpacked his
stuff about 3 times. In the evening, he confessed again “I’m not a
Major yet.” Maj Davidson replied “the only thing that could prevent you
from becoming a Major is if you put your dick in a Lance Corporal, and
since we don’t have any females around, I don’t think that’s going to
be a problem.” Back to garrison bullshit.

View of Three Marines Gear in an Afghan National Army truck

View of the Marine's Camp on Camp Garmsir from the watchtower

View of the generators powering the Marine Camp (left foreground, a few borrowed trucks, and the ANA parts of Camp Garmsir)

View of the General's office and some of the office containers.

Afghan Motor Pool

Panoramic view of the Afghan Motor Pool

Some of the remnants of torn apart or destroyed Afghan National Army Trucks in a dump ground